Thoughts for development from a lurker

Doug Way dway at mat.net
Thu Oct 8 20:41:11 UTC 1998


> ---Dwight Hughes <dwighth at ipa.net> wrote:
> > But I do not think the primary
> > Squeak distribution should be saddled with any external UI, no
> > matter how wonderful.
>
On Thu, 8 Oct 1998, Gran Hultgren wrote:
> Agree also. It would definitely slow the evolution of Squeak down. I
> was thinking more in lines of an additional package which in some
> ingenious way could be hooked in "beneath" the Squeaky UI, and in NO
> WAY replace the Squeaky UI.

There was quite a bit of discussion on this a few weeks ago (which I was
guilty of instigating), and that was pretty much the concensus... that
native window/widget support would need to be in a separate
package/product, it's just too much non-portable stuff to include with the
base Squeak. 
 
The problem now is to find someone willing to put in the effort to create
that separate package!  Boris Shingarov has done this for OS/2 with a
package called Cheese, but a package which supported a cross-platform
toolkit (such as wxWindows) is probably the ultimate solution.  Such a
package could be a great general-purpose free development environment, and
could be maintained in parallel with Squeak. 

This is not a simple task, but anyone who accomplishes this will receive
adulation from the portion of the Squeak community interested in
application development.  Any volunteers? :-) 

> > ---Dwight Hughes <dwighth at ipa.net> wrote:
> > A good foreign function interface (with perhaps some automatic header
> > parsing and automatic generation of Squeak interface code and classes)
> > would be a *great* thing to have, and it would make much of what you
> > are wanting possible, along with a lot more.
 
Someone mentioned SWIG earlier, which has this header parsing/etc support
for Python, Perl and Tcl.  Having used the Tcl/SWIG quite a bit, an
additional SWIG interface for Squeak/Smalltalk would be a great thing. 

- Doug Way
  dway at mat.net
  dway at transom.com
  http://www.transom.com





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